The present disclosure relates generally to communications of whiteboard content between two or more users at respective computers of a computer network, and more specifically to systems and methods for whiteboard collaboration and annotation where each user can annotate and/or update the content presented to all users in real-time.
Real-time whiteboard collaboration systems are useful for sharing information among multiple collaborators or participants, without requiring them to be physically co-located. However, existing systems have notable deficiencies. One stand-alone whiteboard collaboration system requires a user to work entirely within a specific whiteboard application. Therefore, there is no interaction with different computer applications, and annotations that are created within a specific whiteboard application can not be effectively communicated to different computer applications.
Other whiteboard collaboration systems, such as a screen capture system or a transparent window system, make it difficult to prevent a whiteboard program from inhibiting a user's interaction with an underlying application because the whiteboard program is required to have an operating system's focus during annotations. Further, screen areas available for annotations in the screen capture system and the transparent window system are constrained to that of a tool window. Therefore, underlying client applications must be made to fit under the whiteboard program as opposed to the other way around. Furthermore, annotations made in the screen capture system and the transparent window system are drawn on top of any content within client windows, possibly obscuring other information that may be of high interest. In addition, the screen capture system and the transparent window system require that each user set up and carefully maintain each window for underlying applications in a same position and size as well as ensure that contents of each window are identical. In addition to the above disadvantages, the screen capture system also requires a large amount of network bandwidth to be used for transmitting a screen capture image file at a high rate.
Further whiteboard collaboration systems, such as a custom collaboration system, are limited to a particular application that is being used. For example, a custom geographical information tool may communicate annotations with other instances of that specific custom geographical information tool, but could not communicate the annotations with any other type of geographical information tool.